More than 40 years on, Spain revisits a nuclear accident

The year was 1966, the height of the cold war and the final years of the Franco dictatorship, when an American B-52 bomber carrying four thermonuclear bombs collided with a supply plane above the village of Palomares in south-eastern Spain.
Two bombs landed intact, one just outside the village of 1,200 people in the province of Almería, the other salvaged, unscathed, by a fisherman five miles offshore in the Mediterranean, at a depth of 760 metres (2,500 feet). The third and fourth bombs were damaged by a chemical explosion on impact, releasing about 20kg (44lb) of plutonium into the centre of Palomares and surrounding hills.



Nobody died or is known to have developed cancer, but Spain's worst nuclear accident took three months and the work of 1,600 US specialists to clean up before it was promptly forgotten outside of Spain. The amnesia was helped along with a now legendary stunt by the former minister of tourism under Franco, Manuel Fraga, who took a much-photographed swim in the Mediterranean with the American ambassador to prove the waters - and budding tourist industry - were safe.
More than 40 years later, the Spanish nuclear regulatory agency and a national research centre on the environment, energy and technology, CIEMAT, have concluded the first large-scale study of the extent of radioactive contamination around the village, now perched in the middle of the nationwide building frenzy.


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